Editorial January 13, 1912 Issue

"LIKENESS"

Annie M. Knott

Not so many years ago, there were not many religious people who ever thought that man's likeness to God was other than a bodily likeness; in fact, they argued that inasmuch as man's likeness to God is declared in the first chapter of Genesis, God must be corporeal, because mortals are so. Some of these good people, indeed, thought it presumptuous or irreverent to claim for man a likeness to God in nature and character, yet no one would question the statement that Christ Jesus expressed the divine nature, and again and again we are commanded to have "the mind of Christ." Christian Science makes it very clear that unless we have the Christ-mind we are not like God. Our revered Leader says, "The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere" (Science and Health, p. 516).

In meditating upon the subject of man's likeness to God, Christian Scientists naturally and necessarily think of God as Spirit and man as spiritual. This leads to the idea of dominion as the spiritual man's birthright, an idea which was ever in evidence throughout the whole earthly experience of Christ Jesus, in the overcoming of sin, disease, and death, also in his control over the asserted forces of nature. Then the thought of immortality presents itself, since God is "the ever-living One," and knows no death, for "all live unto him." Jesus constantly declared eternal life to, all who would accept his teachings, and in raising from the dream of death the widow's son, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus, he showed the results attained by subordinating sense testimony to the spiritual fact. He also insisted that his followers should do this when he said, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."

It would never be denied that God knows His idea, man, as the perfect reflection of divine intelligence, and this establishes the fact that man must know God, and that as the divine likeness he must reflect all the activity of divine Mind. We are, however, apt to forget, in our eagerness to do, how vital a thing it is to be. This is made very clear in the statement that "the Divine Being must be reflected by man,—else man is not the image and likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the One 'altogether lovely'" (Science and Health, p. 3). "Patient, tender, and true"! How often do we pause to think that our likeness to God must be established by the reflection of these spiritual qualities? And yet each day's service might be unspeakably blessed, glorified indeed, by our holding fast to this spiritual fact.

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